Chapter 1138 — An Unexpected Exchange Between Gods
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
By the time Amorn came to his senses, he had already been standing before the interface that filled his entire field of view for a long while—an interface that refreshed and shifted at a furious pace. Throughout that time, the countless streams of information had continued to flow without pause: matters of note from every region slid past his eyes one after another under the automatic refresh mechanism, until he realized that these rapidly updating things could actually be halted by a single thought, or scrolled back at will to consult their historical records.
For a time afterward, he immersed himself once again in the novelty of browsing the news and reading through the various public discussion boards.
Pompeii, north of the Rockhold Fortress, was building a new rune factory; in the Thorin region, the healed and reunited families had welcomed the first baby of this summer—a healthy infant; construction had begun on the direct railway to the Holy Dragon Duchy; magnificent snowscapes came down from the high mountains of the north, while in the south, the summer afternoons already rippled with waves of wheat.
On a "board" directly under the Imperial Ministry of State Affairs, Amorn saw a map updating in real time—the entire territory of the Cecil Empire, displaying the weather changes of that vast land at every moment: wind and frost, rain and snow, cold and warmth. The color zones and icons representing temperature and weather shifts rose and fell across the image as if alive, and in one corner of the picture he saw a line of text:
This data is computed and compiled in real time by the Servo Brain. Technical trial phase; the demonstration is for reference only.
Amorn did not know what a "Servo Brain" was, but within those ever-changing patterns he genuinely felt something indescribable... a vitality. A vitality that transcended the individual, that rose above the present moment. He pondered for a long time before he realized that this vitality came from every individual connected to this network—from the whole of mortal civilization, here and now. In all the years he could remember, mortal civilization had never burgeoned and grown as it did at this moment, beating violently like a powerful heart.
"Wonderful... truly wonderful..."
The former God of Nature could not help but voice his admiration, a smile spreading across his face. In all fairness, what he was seeing now would have been nothing remarkable to a former deity: back when he could still hear the prayers of the faithful, countless elves and a smaller number of human believers had channeled their minds and their faith toward the god. By reading that information, Amorn had been able to grasp the changes across the entire Silver Empire and even parts of the human realms at any moment—especially changes touching on the natural domain. What he could "see" then differed in form of presentation, but in content it was scarcely different from the information flowing through the neural network.
And yet this was precisely what moved him most—what shocked him most. He had once been able to do these things, and it had come from the authority of a god. But today mortals had accomplished something much the same, relying on mortal wisdom alone. And this "authority" that had once belonged to the gods—who could wield it now?
Anyone. Anyone at all—so long as you could afford the immersion pod equipment. In Cecil today, the cost of using such new devices fell at an astonishing rate every day; in some regions, the Ministry of State Affairs even allocated substantial funds specifically to subsidize the populace, so that this "infrastructure" might spread through society as quickly as possible.